People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds

I’m getting up there in age and I’m worried about this myself. My criteria for retirement is not just that I have enough money to stop working, but that I also have enough to travel or do a hobby and stay mentally engaged with something.

There's a lesson here about social media: if you tolerate people pretending to be Nazis "as a joke", then you will soon become overrun with actual Nazis.

That is my fear as well. "Believe nothing," would be the wrong takeaway from all this, but I'm afraid a cynical population of our youth might very well be following that course.

Be skeptical of skepticism too I tell my daughters.

I had an epiphany in mid-November 2018. I realized that, despite watching and reading the news on a pretty much daily basis, none of my voting decisions were changing as a result. I examined voting decisions I'd made going back to 2016 and realized none of them were materially changed by watching the news with such regularity and granularity. This isn't to say that I'm set in my ways and never change my viewpoint. Rather, I think it's more a reflection on the fact that political candidates don't tend to change much over short periods of time, so after a certain point watching or reading the news will simply reaffirm what you already know about them rather than introduce fundamentally new information. A politician who had viewpoint X or trait Y yesterday probably still has viewpoint X today or trait Y today; that may not be true in 5 years, but I don't need to be plugged in every single day.

I realized I only really need to "check in" periodically and see if the voting landscape has truly changed. When "checking in," I've found I have far less allegiance to a particular source and am more open to checking several and comparing. When you don't follow a particular source almost religiously and only peek in once a week or once every two weeks, the "circus" nature of the media starts becoming alarmingly apparent. The disparity between the calm of real life and the 24/7 chaos and tragedy of the news becomes impossible to ignore. My voting patterns have not changed as a result of my disengagement, but my anxiety/outrage/uneasiness have all went down significantly. I now view my previous habit of watching the media every day as a downright unhealthy addiction.

What you see on blogs is no more reliable than what you see on FOX, which itself is no more reliable than what you see on youtube. It's pretty much all rubbish a lot of the time.

So yeah, you stay away from mainstream media, then you'll likely be consuming "shocking", and just as fake, media from some other source instead. That's just the preponderance of what's out there unfortunately. No avoiding it really.

Thinking about it game theoretically, it's probably smarter just to accept that there is fake media out there, and go ahead and consume media from whatever your favored sources are with that caveat in mind.

ie - It's fine to watch mainstream media. Certainly FOX, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC etc are all no worse than reading or watching anything else. Certainly no worse than anything you see on youtube. But you should "buy" stories like you'd "buy" anything else...

Caveat Emptor.

I like the distinction you put here, as I've found most "long form" journalism to be focused on superficial details and to try to emphasize innuendo and rumor into emotional plays rather than focusing on facts. As soon as I hit a physical description of one of the people involved that covers more than a sentence (when the article isn't covering a topic involving a physical description), I know the author isn't focused on the parts I care about.

Which is a shame, as there is plenty of investigative journalism that benefits from deeper coverage. Just a lot fewer people doing it. (likely as a consequence of fewer people caring enough to make it financially viable, to properly place blame, but from my end I want the material, not to place blame)

—Dorothy Sayers

That’s twice this thread I’ve seen this Vonnegut quote as a thought-terminating cliche, which is two times too many. If you want to have a deeper discussion on the effects of irony on a community, by all means let’s do so. What we should not do is reduce the entire thing down to a pithy mess of fake profundity based on the fame of its speaker, that would be shouted down as the unsubstantiated conclusion it is, if any one of us said it.

The study refutes that statement. I'm not saying we're invincible, I'm just saying we're less susceptible.

Anyways, afa mental decline with age goes, some of it is random, some of it is genetics, some of it is lifestyle that is 100% in your control.

We know they have industrial scale operations to post propaganda now. [1] Obviously this had to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure many intelligence agencies have been researching how information spread on the internet ever since it was created.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...

Are you saying you think all those email forwards during that time period were all organic and none were the result of PR/propaganda/psyops operations?

I'm honestly not sure which is the null hypothesis here, and thus who owns the burden of proof.

This explains SO much of not just 4chan sub-groups, but a lot of internet groups, and I honestly don't think older generations can't think like this. Ironic humor doesn't occur to them; they take it all at face value. Unfortunately ideas spread on 4chan and elsewhere stop becoming memes and start becoming someones reality.

There's no better example of this than Facebook. A graveyard of dead, crappy, overused memes, and younger generations are not using Facebook anymore, it's older generations now.

In addition, a huge difference between traditional media, and modern "fake news" is accountability.

As biased as they can be, traditional articles always come with an author name, and published or run under the responsibility of the media themselves.

They can, and often do, give a specific story a slant which supports their point of view or agenda, but they really cannot outright lie, since they would be called out or even be subject to legal action:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/23/sicilian-journ...

"Fake News" have no traceable source, no attributable author, no accountability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

It's also pretty prevalent on the radio, and has a fair few historical precedents from before journalism saw credibility as an important thing to keep in mind (yellow journalism et all).

Seriously? Pretty much all major networks have been caught making stuff up. CNN has been caught giving debate questions ahead of time to their pet candidate.

To me, it's ideas like this that perpetuate the problem. It clings to the idea that journalists and journalism - at least that which is sold via mainstream media channels - are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity. They aren't. It is much healthier in my opinion to understand that news is not special within its medium. It's entertainment like everything on every other channel. It's somewhat less fictional obviously, but the entertainment motive is what lies behind it.

I would suggest instead that Fox News was the first major mainstream media source that dropped the pretensions and openly did what "news" has been doing since Walter Kronkite but with an equal and opposite bias. And to that extent, it has had a beneficial effect on society: we now know to watch carefully what a given journalist decides to report on and what they don't and we work harder to extract facts, if there are any, from the pre-determined narratives they are wrapped in. Whether purposely or not, they made news look like a joke. And we are smarter now because of it.

That's is absolutely untrue. The reason you think that is because your pre-existing bias disagrees with them.

CNN, HuffingtonPost, Washington Post, etc, etc, etc do the exact same thing, from the other side.

Here's a helpful list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/

Which sites that you read are on there?

I've made a conscious decision to disbelieve any news unless it came from a site on this list: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/

I only news sources not on that list for entertainment.

Are you sure? How can you tell?

I guess today's CNN and their much more pronounced left-wing orientation is just a response to the right-leaning stuff from Fox? Or it just seems more left-wing now in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst

While I agree that journalism is in crisis, this isn't the first time. While Hearst was famous for yellow journalism, his papers weren't the only ones, and often the emotional sensationalism was intended to support a particular candidate (or denounce their opponent).

Not sure I’ve noticed a pattern, age or otherwise, with such attitudes.

Now, the same points generally hold with radio, as well.

I was just saying that propaganda is not new. Of course, I don't know that this research is claiming these folks are the most misinformed. So, I could be taking it in a pointless direction, as well.

They could and did seek alternative opinions, though often it cost more. Subscribing to newsletters has long been an option. For example, the John Birch Society's TheNewAmerican was created in 1985 as the merger of two older newsletters that date to 1956 and 1965. It's now available at https://www.thenewamerican.com/ but you can still get the print version delivered to your house twice a month.

These are the classification sources according to soundwave106:

A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media [1]

B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar to buzzfeed suggesting an ideological tilt.

There is some additional methodology in the study link.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...

But if you’re talking about the original article: if older Americans are more likely to spread fake news, and older Americans are more likely to be conservative, it stands to reason that most of the fake news being spread would skew conservative. It’s a function of the audience’s age as opposed to their politics.

I’m sure if you zero’d in on fake news spread by people under 40 it would skew left.

The documentarian on the other hand appears to have never listened to Rush Limbaugh before setting out to do this documentary since she knows so little that's non-controversial about the man. Such as his quirk of saying ditto. She seems ro have just decided who he was by osmosis by reading left wing news articles about him. Rather than try to genuinely understand the appeal of right wing radio she just dismisses it as naziesque brainwashing. The way she belittles her father while not appreciating the narrow range of political thought she has exposed herself to is just so incredibly smug and oblivious.

This documentary in a nutshell is what is wrong with political discourse.

It is true that stylistic cues won't tell you everything. The rest, unfortunately, is a lot harder to teach. Avoiding the obviously-shoddy sites is sufficient as a start; the rest is really going to be dependent on particular knowledge in areas like science, history, etc.

EDIT: Kinda surprised at the downvotes I'm getting here. Have you _looked_ at the Daily Mail frontpage?

I'd lean more towards the Guardian but I don't think I'd trust either outright.

It is not an objective truth that non-authoritarianism > authoritarianism. That's just, like, an opinion, man.

Further: when has Russia not been an authoritarian state?

A story like that would make sense to you?

"Hey, why is it that socialist ideas are so unpopular with adults who have life experience?"

Easily become a proxy for race/class? They already were used to disenfranchise people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting

> From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the United States administered literacy tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with poll taxes, residency and property restrictions and extra-legal activities (violence, intimidation)[2] were all used to deny suffrage to African Americans.

There should be a registry of doctors who are creationists or believe other nonsense (I'll give the UFOs a pass depending on just how fervent their belief in them is; I mean, can you prove we haven't been visited? The evidence isn't very good but you can't prove a negative. If they believe they've been abducted, however, that's a whole different level. Of course, I also can't disprove their claim but I'd rather err on the side of caution and assume they have mental problems and find another doctor.).

I don't want a doctor giving me medical advice when they don't even believe in basic science.

>It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.

Perhaps, but I think it should be obvious by now that people who decided to vote for Trump have had an extremely detrimental effect on the nation's economy and well-being.

As I pointed out in another post here, I personally do NOT think the problem is age, despite the thrust of this article. As I said before, the alt-right is not full of geriatric people, it's full of men in their 20s-40s, mostly men with poor education.

As a man in that age group myself, I hate to say it, but I think the country would actually be better off if only women (of all ages), and men over the age of 60 could vote.

Would you really try to defend the point of view that the kids wouldn't do much better ?